Mary B. Brooke, 1899

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FromThePage Project Walkthrough

These papers are an assortment of ancient texts hand-written by members of the Brooke family. The documents can be dated from 1750 to 1980, with the majority of them being written between 1860-1954. The diaries and journals of the sisters Edith F. Brooke Green and Mary B. Brooke compose the majority of the collection. The papers also contain correspondence from various branches of the extended family, diaries from other family members, travel journals, a scrapbook, business records, poetry, sketches, printed ephemera, memorabilia, photographs, and two oral history transcripts.
The materials in this collection document the everyday lives of members of the Brooke family. The daybooks focus on farm life, housekeeping tasks, local social events, visiting, weather, and vacations. The correspondence provides a glimpse into family connections and relationships. Correspondents devote their attention to farm or city life, social events, Quaker religious concerns, courtship, vacations and travel, household duties, astronomy, and some business dealings. Tinted photograph of members of the Brooke family sitting outside on the lawn. Two of them are facing the camera but the rest of the family members are looking off to the side.

All the documents within the collection are part of the Brooke family’s daybooks. Daybooks are essentially journals belonging to an individual who wrote about their day and usually do not include any type of feeling or thought about what they did. It’s mainly used for the writer to read over and reflect on what they did at the end of the day.

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When transcribing it’s fine to not know what some words are saying, usually if you continue the word will repeat itself but with clearer handwriting. Use context clues to try to help you. Skip over the words you are struggling with and try to fill them in based on what the rest of the entry is about! It definitely will help:) You can also utilize the Fromthepage demo video to help you understand how to transcribe using this online platform!

You can review other transcriptions, start on new texts, or add onto uncomplete transcriptions! Join our community in learning more about the Brooke family and what life was like back then. Feel free to add comments to any of the texts and support our cause!

When transcribing it’s fine to not know what some words are saying, usually if you continue the word will repeat itself but with clearer handwriting. Use context clues to try to help you. Skip over the words you are struggling with and try to fill them in based on what the rest of the entry is about! It definitely will help :)

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In order to improve your transcribing skills, practice with different works to learn new techniques that will help you when transcribing. Look for repetitions or patterns in the text. This can largely apply to prepositional words that may appear more often than other words, such as at, and, for, the, etc. This will help you in reading text faster and more efficiently.

Feel free to transcribe as many pages as you like. You don’t have to create an account to start transcribing, but we highly recommend and encourage you to make an account to log your progress and come back to previously transcribed documents. Registered users can also add notes to pages to comment on difficult words, suggest readings, or discuss the texts. If you’d like to learn how to create an account, check YouTube for step-by-step instructions.

Once you sign up for an account, a new Transcribe tab will appear above each page. You can create or edit transcriptions by modifying the text entry field and saving. Each modification is stored as a separate version of the page, so that it should be easy to revert to older versions if necessary.

Registered users can also add notes to pages to comment on difficult words, suggest readings, or discuss the texts.

Once you click a spread to start transcribing you’ll see various tabs and modules on the top. The first thing you’ll see is the Overview module which will allow you to see the photo scanned copy of the text as well as a text entry section on the right where you can read current transcriptions. You can start your transcriptions right away by clicking the ‘Transcribe’ module right next to ‘Overview’.

There are rules and other guidelines you can follow to ensure consistency throughout the transcription process. These rules are called transcription conventions and are located below any document that can be transcribed. Utilize this resource whenever you need clarification on how to transcribe certain documents:

Transcription Conventions PDF

If you’d like to zoom into the image of the photo-scanned text, simply tap the screen where the image is. You can also tap once to see other features that you can use to edit the image for better viewing. This includes zooming out, in, full screen, and much more. Feel free to look around and see what works best for you!